How Innovation Happens — Lesson #2: Hire a VP of Curiosity, Even If It’s Just You

I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.

“Stuck in an idea rut? Maybe you should hire a Senior Vice President of Continuous Curiosity!”

Merck’s First International Curiosity Study found that more than 8 in 10 people agree a curious person is more likely to bring an idea to life at work, and only 2 in 10 actually describe themselves as innately curious. Worse: 73% of people don’t feel comfortable asking more questions at work, and only 9% said their organization was “extremely encouraging” of curiosity at all.

That’s not a personality problem. That’s an organizational design failure. Most companies leave curiosity to chance, hoping it survives the org chart. It usually doesn’t, because nobody owns it, nobody protects time for it, and nobody’s job description rewards it.

So I’ve floated the same provocation for years: what if curiosity had a seat at the table? A Senior VP of Curiosity, whose entire job is to protect unfocused exploration time, ask the questions nobody else is allowed to ask in a status meeting, and turn wandering curiosity into channeled activity.

Here’s the practical question: what can you do to accelerate curiosity throughout your team and your organization? Start here.

Action Items:

• If you can’t create the role, create the time: block a recurring “curiosity hour” on your own calendar, protected like any client meeting.
• Ask your team, this week, what they’re curious about that has nothing to do with their job description. Write the answers down. Revisit in 90 days.
• Reward a good question as visibly as you’d reward a good answer, at least once in your next team meeting.

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.